Overview of Building Vitas in the New Vita Builder
The new Vita Builder is a new user experience for building and exporting faculty CVs in Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR). With enhanced flexibility and control, both faculty and administrative users can create vitas based upon data in the system that better reflect academic achievements and institutional standards. Some new key features include:
- New interface for building and managing vitas.
- Expanded citation format options for vita exports.
- Ability to add freeform and formatted custom text.
- Personal vita template creation and management.
- Enhanced section grouping and renaming capabilities.
- New styling and formatting options. Users can preview styling or layout changes without having to emulate a user and generate a vita.
- Faculty can customize the tabular view by showing or hiding columns for custom sections, ensuring a direct correlation between table column data and the information displayed in the Vita. If the tabular display style is selected for scholarly citations, column show/hide capabilities may be limited.
- Template archiving. This will remove the archived template from active use and move it to the ‘Archived Templates’ tab of the template list where it can easily be restored.
- Change tracking for reporting. Administrators can view or download a CSV of this log for auditing purposes.
- The new Add Custom Text feature for a generated vita is not supported with FAR to RPT integration as this integration generates a Vita in real-time based on a template (not by pulling a personalized, generated vita directly from a user’s account).
- Activities cannot be rearranged or reordered in personal vitas.
- The first release will not permit the bolding of the author amongst a list of co-authors/co-contributors within a publication.
New Autogeneration Feature
Institiutonal Administrators in FAR now have the ability to indicate whether to share vitas with faculty! If “Show to faculty” is selected, the vita will automatically appear as a link on the list of institutional vitas to which the faculty have access.
The New Vita Builder
Benefits
The new Vita Builder introduces features that:
- Better represent faculty accomplishments: Users can leverage system data for professional advancement, annual reviews, grant applications, and sabbaticals to better represent all academic accomplishment
- Enhance institutional CV formatting: Administrators can customize vita templates to align with institutional standards and specific academic disciplines.
-
Increase customization and organization: Users can rename section headers and group activities by activity classifications or database fields.
- Grants have the added ability to group activities by Status.
- Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions can also be grouped by Subtype and Status.
- Improve user experience: Drafting, previewing, and archiving templates are now supported, with all changes logged for audit purposes. Administrators can view or download a CSV of this log for auditing purposes.
- Provide advanced display options: Users can add section descriptions, modify sorting and numbering, and include links to attachments.
Limitations
- The new ‘Add Custom Text’ feature is not supported in Interfolio Review, Promotion & Tenure (RPT) cases.
- Individual activities cannot be rearranged in generated personal vitas; order is controlled via template sections.
- The new Vita Builder is not compatible with legacy Faculty180 evaluations.
- Institutional vita templates currently support PDF exports only. We are scoping the work for future improvements, including possible exports in the Microsoft Word format.
- Changes to template section settings do not retroactively apply to existing templates and require manual updates.
- If ‘Terminal Degree’ is not being used, it will still show up as Terminal Degree: No in the Listing and Tabular display styles on the vita output. To remove it, you must hide the column.
- More limited biosketch approach: It is strongly recommended scholars use the government-mandated SciENcv platform for NIH, NSF, and AHRQ grant applications requiring a biosketch.
- Tabular display style is not recommended for scholarly citations due to limited show/hide capabilities.
- Filtering and grouping in tabular format is limited to predefined dropdown options; open text entries cannot be filtered.
Demo
Best Practice - Using The New Vita Builder in Faculty Activity Reporting (July 2022)
Come join members of our Interfolio team as they highlight the features of our new and improved Vita Builder in Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR). This new user experience includes improvements and new features that allow both administrative and faculty users greater control and flexibility when setting up and generating vitas based upon data in the system.